Politics & Power Quote by Alfred Adler

Adler takes a deliberate swing at the most famous sanitizing line about war in modern thought: Clausewitzs claim that war is politics by other means. By negating it outright, he refuses the comfortable fantasy that war is merely statecraft conducted with louder tools. In Adlers framing, war is not a rational instrument but a moral rupture: a mass-crime committed against the "community of man". That phrase matters. He is not talking about nations or borders; he is invoking an imagined human commons, a psychological and ethical bond that war violates.

The subtext is clinical, even prosecutorial. As a psychologist, Adler is attuned to the stories people tell themselves to make violence feel necessary, coherent, even virtuous. Calling war a crime strips away the glamour of sacrifice and the technocratic language of strategy. It implies intent, culpability, and the normal human mechanisms of denial that allow crowds to participate. "Perpetrated" suggests that this is not an accident of history but an act enabled by leaders, institutions, and a public willing to outsource conscience.

Context sharpens the edge. Adler lived through the rise of mass mobilization, industrial slaughter, propaganda, and nationalism as a substitute religion. Against that backdrop, his line reads less like pacifist sentimentality and more like a diagnosis: war is the catastrophic end stage of social pathology, where collective belonging is hijacked into collective harm. The power of the quote is its reframing: it doesnt argue policy; it indicts the entire moral alibi.